My experience with filming run-and-gun short documentaries has taught me that it’s imperative to pack as light and as efficiently as possible. I wouldn’t have the space in the van to store lighting equipment, we wouldn’t have the production crew/manpower to stage and clear the equipment quickly in the indie studios, and finally we would be driving during winter, which of course meant direwolves and traveling on foot through snow and ice — not so good when you’re carrying around expensive candy.

TL;dr Make sure you pack light and can move quickly with equipment in order to keep up with the team.

When choosing a camera for any production, there are a couple of important deciding factors for me that go into renting or purchasing one: (a) weight, (b) dynamic range, and (c) environment.

A. Weight

Will the camera’s weight slow you down? If you like to move with subjects by using a shoulder mount, if you need to fit through tight spaces, you probably won’t be carrying Red Epic around with you.

The cost of energy expended from putting the camera down and setting it back onto your shoulder means that your ability to press record in time to capture spontaneous moments is that much slower. One of the primary objectives of a good cinematographer IMO is to minimize his chances at missing moments that typically happen in the blink of an eye (and thus can’t be repeated without some degree of acting and inauthenticity).

B. Dynamic Range

What is your lighting situation going to be? With documentaries, it’s hard to predict where your subjects will move and how to light them properly and persistently over time. This means that I must be able to punch in my ISO as fast as possible.

When the team returned home to Austin from Chicago in episode one for example, they had a post-mortem on the game jam process inside the van. It was 2AM and pitch black out. So we strung a couple of Diego’s camping lights up onto the side panels to give everyone some light, and I bumped up the ISO on the Mk3 to maybe 10,000. It’s hella grainy, but you make out their silhouettes and it gets the job done.

C. Environment

How well will the camera withstand traveling and weather conditions? Fortunately the 5D’s batteries never froze, but a better choice may have been a Sony or Panasonic HDV cam.

Tl;dr There are many factors that go into choosing a camera and its support, such as weight, dynamic range, environment, S-Logs, stability, etc. Don’t let the analysis paralyze you from going out into the field and experimenting with one or the other.

Most of the gear fit into a single PortaBrace that I slung over my shoulder and one Osprey backpack!

(War mode + epic beard ftw)

Editing happens on a Macbook Pro using PluralEyes to sync sound, Premiere Pro to edit, Photoshop and After Effects for designing stuff (mostly tweaking Diego’s awesome animations he’s shipped me!), Audition for sound editing. We use the El Gato Capture HD device hooked up to 2 laptops and 1 TV to record various development stages and Screenflow to capture a plethora of other things: missing gameplay footage, scrolling code, character animations in Unity, etc.

In case you’re interested in learning more about what goes into choosing a camera, check out this awesome post over at No Film School with thoughts from Still Motion:

If you ever wished you could put an Indie Van Game Jam sticker on your laptop or throw an Indie Van Game Jam disc around, you’re in luck! We just opened our online store where you can buy Binary Solo and Indie Van Game Jam themed goodies starting with a sticker and an Ultimate disc.

Both products to start feature Flip Bitworthy, the Indie Van Game Jam mascot you see in the show during the introduction and driving across the map. The first is a high-quality vinyl Flip Bitworthy sticker. It’s about 9 cm in diameter, so it’s a good size for the back of that Apple MacBook. The other product is an Ultimate disc with a Flip Bitworthy Indie Van Game Jam logo. For the curious, it is a Discraft Ultrastar, the kind used by USA Ultimate players.

Much like the characters in Game of Thrones promise that “Winter is coming,” I also promise that episode two is coming soon. You probably won’t see it coming. It will knock you off your socks, then knock you out of them again when you’re putting them on the second time.

This week, we experienced a huge morale blow when our 4TB hard drive, the hub of all Indie Van Game Jam data, failed to boot up. But we sent it to an IT Recovery Service, and now it’s back up and running!

In the meantime, I have been working off another external hard drive with backup files and have synced picture and sound for episode three(!).

The main reason that episode two is really taking a while to release in addition to all the tech and software troubleshooting — is that we want make the best possible episode for you!

Each episode (~ 22 minutes) is somewhat unique in terms of its story beats, adding to the time it takes to crack it. To the extent that we know roughly the chronological outline of each episode (you can see that below), we really don’t know for certain where the pieces fit inside those scenes and how they develop/payoff until we open some Topo Chicos and discuss.

The episode’s story starts making more sense when we view a rough cut of everything that could be in the episode (the rough cut is anywhere from 1 – 3 hours!) From that point forward, our meetings involve making tough choices related to cutting lines or entire scenes, generating a master assets list of things we usually don’t have but need to generate for the episode, designing and/or revising animations and title cards, creating voice over scripts, and re-sifting through A LOT of footage to make sure we’ve chosen the crème de la crème in terms of jokes, gameplay content and interview material (roughly 10 hours of footage per episode). Phew!

Intro Animation

Binary Solo HQ: Game Analysis

Studio Intro

Travel: {Whiteboarding, Art, Coding, SFX, Pit Stops, etc.}

Studio Game Jam Playthrough

Game Jam finish (in the van)

Wrap-up

Credits

Link to download the game

In the meantime, we’ve read through everyone’s generous feedback from episode one (thank you!) and are confident that this episode outshines the previous one.

Additionally, we hope to provide some exciting extra content as soon as the episode releases.

We even have a tentative title for you (spoiler alert):

Episode Two: Wizards of the East Coast

This is Part I of IV of a series about the making of Indie Van Game Jam.